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BGonline.org Forums
Curious question: What is the difference between backgammon players?
Posted By: Stick In Response To: Curious question: What is the difference between backgammon players? (Max Levenstein)
Date: Thursday, 4 August 2011, at 4:53 a.m.
I agree with a couple different people who have replied already on a few different points. I will try to organize my thoughts as we go along so bear with me as this could turn into another mammoth post.
- The Basics - master them completely. I chant this mantra with everything I do. There's a reason my friends say 'he's good at everything he does'. It's not that I'm naturally good at shit, I don't buy into that, but it's that I do have an understanding of what it takes to be better than the rest. In backgammon what I consider the basics covers a lot of territory. Off the top of my head I would include the early game, every type of racing situation under the sun, holding games of any flavor, early game blitzing cubes, prime v. prime games, if you're into match play understanding match equity, gammon values, etc... at all major scores, special interest to how dmp is played, how to play out a blitz, how to play out a failed blitz, bearing in, bearing off, at least a competent level of playing backgames out and when to cube, pay now v. pay later decisions, and I'm sure another 100 things that I'm not going to take the time to think about right now. You should become solid in all these areas so that when someone comes up to you with a position and it falls into one of them you'd be ready to take Falafel's money if his opinion varied from your own.
- Deliberate Practice - As Phil mentioned. This is the big difference between players. There are probably thousands of players who play more you do but this doesn't matter in the least. It's how you spend your time when you do work with the game. If all you do is show up at the local chouette every day and play 4 hours whether you are making money or not you're hardly going to improve. However, can you imagine how much improvement you'd make if you spent even half of that time really studying at home? Phil mentioned one book and I'll mention another that has been referred to before on the forums, Talent is Overrated. In it you will basically see that it isn't the person that makes one great, it's how much 'deliberate practice' they put into it.
- Use XG - Create a profile, only play on it when you're in the mood for serious play. Play a session of whatever length. Immediately after that session take the time to thoroughly go through the session play by play (not error by error, you learn so much less). In the beginning I recommend setting the blunder threshold high, depending on your level of play. The first setting I recommend is having it at any decision that costs you .120 of equity or more. When you are going through your match and you run across a blunder of this size copy the position over and save it to a separate folder. I recommend making two folders, one for checker plays and one for cubes. The object is not to collect a massive amount of positions, that's why we set the threshold so high. What we want to do ideally is pick apart your biggest errors. You want to gather up 10-20 positions and really understand them. Roll them out, play them out, until you understand where you went wrong. Review them and once you feel comfortable that if faced with a similar decision OtB you would now make the correct decision, move them out of that folder. You don't want that folder to accumulate too many positions. You always want it to be a working blunder refectory. Now, once you notice you're playing a lot and not gathering up enough positions drop that blunder threshold down to .100, repeat. Next threshold .080, repeat. Along the way you should pick up a lot of reference positions you may want to save to a different folder. With any luck you'll also see your PR slowly decline over all the sessions you're playing as you get better and better.
- If you attend tournaments interact with other (good) players who are discussing positions. Again you'll pick up on a lot of misunderstood positions by humans, hear feedback from the best players and what they were thinking, and before you know it you'll be confident enough to speak up and say 'MCG, how do you make that play? It's so hopeless ... do you even know how to play the game?'
- Books? Articles? Lessons? Post Whoring? - There is no shortage of bg information out there available to you but with all this media I think it's up to you to decide what helps your game the most. For example, I still read everything about poker that ever passes in front of me but most of the time when I'm done with a book I don't feel I've learned a thing and think that my time would have been much better spent elsewhere if I was trying to improve. Now with backgammon you aren't as likely to have that happen as most books at least have interesting problems you can learn something from but still, decide if that's a good avenue for you to take. Some people love lessons and they really help, especially if you have a good teacher. Other people don't take so well to lessons.
A few random things of note ... it depends on whether you really want to get better or it's an idea floating in your head that sounds good in theory but who wants to put in the time? You can put in what I see as a minimal amount of time and become what is seen as a 'competent' player. Maybe someone who averages a 5 PR? The amount of work required for this isn't all that much in relation to how much work it takes to go from a 5 PR to a 4 PR and from a 4 PR to a 3 PR is even a bigger allocation of time and work. It's not exactly fun, you won't reap many rewards from it in your actual results and this is the main reason I think bg players are such slackers to begin with.
Try not to burn yourself out too if you decide you do want to invest a lot of time into bg. Getting burnt out is the worst. It's supposed to be as fun as you can make it and if you hate what you're doing, aka if you're only trying to do it to become better and there's no other enjoyment in it, than you aren't as likely to absorb the information. I've taken large chunks of time off in the past from backgammon and poker because I'd had enough for a while. It's not the end of the world if you skip out on 3 months of backgammon, it's not like being in good physically fit shape. You can come back 3 months later and still be in good form whereas if you were a runner and took off 3 months you'd have someone to answer to if you tried to go out and perform as you did before.
Stick ... tired of typing atm.
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